1. Field of the Invention
The invention relates in general to an embedded system, and more particularly to an embedded system with web-based user interface, a firmware thereof and a method for providing information thereof.
2. Description of the Related Art
A major problem that arises in the development and design of an embedded system is how its memory resource is used, such as how much memory space is occupied by its firmware, since the embedded system has a limited amount of computing and memory resource.
For example, a flash memory that is generally employed to store the firmware of an embedded system has a limited memory capacity that is inadequate to store executable code for user interface of all different human languages that are supported by the embedded system. In order to enable the embedded system to provide a user interface with a different language, a conventional approach is to provide firmware images for different languages, for example, in an optical disk or a web site, so that the user can download any of the images and update the firmware of the embedded system. When the user wants to switch the user interface for a selected language, the corresponding firmware image must be written onto the flash memory to overwrite the previous firmware image entirely. The embedded system, after rebooting, will operate with the user interface for the selected language.
The conventional approach to switching of the user interface for a different language is readily to be implemented. However, the need of overwriting the previous firmware image and rebooting the whole system is time-consuming and inconvenient.
In addition, booting a conventional embedded system initially requires reading the firmware, which is pre-compressed, from the flash memory, decompressing the firmware to obtain executable code and storing the executable code in a random access memory (RAM) until the decompression of the firmware is completed. The system and application programs, including user interface programs, cannot be invoked from the executable code unless the above decompression is finished. Thus, if the available memory space of the RAM is inadequate, the overall system performance will be degraded. A common solution to this problem is to install RAM devices with large capacity. However, the product cost of the system will be inevitably increased.